Subsidy for inbound business — toward 2020, with 3 million + financial support

2020 is coming. The number of tourists are rapidly increasing.

There are too many hotels and hostels around my parents’ house in Kyoto. About ten years ago, Sakura (cherry-blossom) and Kouyou (red-leaves) seasons are the two only seasons that Kyoto gets packed with tourists. But nowadays Kyoto has no off-season. Too many tourists are coming everyday, and local people cannot even take a bus. TOKYO is the same.

Too many hostels are built, too many tourists are riding on the bus, eating at a restaurants, buying traditional products at crafts’ shops, but many of the restaurants, cafe, bar, stores, and even hostels have difficulties “internationalizing” their services.

Tokyo Convention & Visitors Bureau came up with a special plan to internationalize services for tourists from overseas. It provides up to 3 million yen subsidy for each of the stores trying to provide services for inbound tourists.

Not only the store owners operating within the industry mentioned above, this subsidy could be a good hook to start your sales talk.

If your clients are operating business for inbound tourists, and if your service is targeting them, like creating multi-language menu, developing a system for translation, providing multi-language services, hiring staff and enhancing their skill to provide service for tourists….

It’s a big opportunity to expand your service.

Literally no limits

As I mentioned, the applicants can get up to 3 million yen subsidy per store. That means if they are operating multiple stores in Tokyo, each of the stores get up to 3 million yen. You can even use this subsidy to install wifi into your store.

Seems like increasing the number of the tourists is the last prop for Japanese economy.

All of us are just looking ahead to 2020.
No plan after that, no guess, no strategy, as far as I’ve observed.

I’m kind of certain Tokyo Convention & Visitors Bureau decides to provide this subsidy for FY2019 as well, because this is one of the initiatives “Smart city” led by Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

We will have a lecture for this subsidy on October 27th 2PM-4PM at Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library. For more information, click here.

Let’s see what happens before 2020 and after 2020!